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There are a couple of real issues with indentation, but mostly in Python's favor.

Indentation without line noise is a major convenience for those typing with their voice or quite possibly other adaptive technologies.

Indentation without line-noise lacks the redundancy that braces and a "tidy" reformatter can provide, but gets a similar effect directly. Editors that have been trained to match brackets may have a harder time skipping back to

Not these eyes, alas. It was messing me up bigtime when I closed a bunch of blocks at once (if in a loop in a loop). No doubt I'll get used to it, but don't make the mistake of confusing familiar for intuitive. Nothing about these infernal machines is actually intuitive, and eyes can no doubt learn to see the invisible indents the same way that fingers can learn to hit the match-curly key sequence.

Most tellingly, the Ubuntu team feels the simpler visually obvious syntactic indenting is a major feature of making the language end-user friendly, which is why they've selected Python and not GAMBAS or Perl or Ruby or BASH as the single scripting, install, and extension language for Ubuntu.

That's nice for the Ubuntu folks, but I remain skeptical that Python is any better than Perl or Ruby in the newbie department. I've had new programmers revel in Perl the same way I've seen new programmers revel in Python. I believe firmly that diversity and not uniformity is good for software development: Perl, Ruby, Java, etc. won't just wither away to be historical footnotes to the almighty conquest of Python. Regardless of who is behind Ubuntu and how well they've done, people are different and prefer different things.

I say this because in the late 90s we were agitating against the spread of Java. And the Java bubble burst in 2001. Perl's bubble burst with PHP 3 (or was it 4?). Python's bubble will burst, too.

I've had new programmers revel in Perl the same way I've seen new programmers revel in Python.

As a new programmer I revelled in QBasic, but it doesn't meant that was a good language. Programming is fun, people can enjoy it in nearly any language. Maybe not COBOL... submitting batch jobs isn't satisfying. But all languages that aren't soul-eating are fun.

But new users aren't all equally successful in what they are trying to do. Moreso, they don't even know how to judge their success; they don't have